Chinese manufacturers are moving on. New designs appear, which are maybe easy to hack, maybe not. Replacing an TSSOP20 µC on a PCB isn't difficult, though, and I decided to give two new very cheap boards a try:

This one is available for $1.27 (incl. shipping); it clearly has a different circuit design than the ones explored so far in the HaD project. Since mo one west of China knows what's under the LED, I ordered one to figure that out. Maybe it's hackable.

Another one uses a more modern DC/DC converter silicon, the XL4015, but otherwise it looks very similar to the old design:

What's promising is the ISP pads on the backside of the board that show a pattern typical for boards with STM8 µC. I don't really expect one there, but who knows. I've seen it for $1.65 (incl. shipping), and maybe I can hack it to run STM8 eForth.

This project has been very quiet - to be honest about it I don't even know if the $1.50 modules available today still has a trusty STM8S003F3P6 or rather an incompatible (but a couple of cents cheaper) Nuvoton N76E003AT20 under the LED display. It's true, the STM8S003F3P6 chips are getting cheaper again, but as a buyer of "cheap gadgets" you should now be prepared to do some soldering.

However, STM8 eForth is alive and kicking, and with the code in this project, a $0.85 STM8S103F3P6 breakout board, and a $0.50 LM2596 module a programmable power supply can be built for ver,y little money. In fact, it's possible to control several LM2596 modules with one Forth module - which should be interesting for robustness tests use cases, like the one described here.

Among many other things (e.g. EVALUATE and IDLE Operation) the upcoming STM8 eForth 2.2.22 improves the communication robustness of devices that share the GPIO used for communication with the 7S-LED display.

Please note that the coding examples can now use the e4thcom Forth code #include & #require features. It's also possible to create binaries from the same code using the STM8S simulation feature of uCsim.

Nice, this little project seems to catch the attention of many of you!

It's really easy and cheap to hack the CN2596 DC/DC modules, and I can't wait to see on of these boards running your code, to do something useful, or to confuse a cat, I don't care :-) In any case, if you have questions just ask!

It's a bit quiet here because I'm currently bringing Forth to the HC12 wireless RS232 bridge. Robust communication to "smart things" in-house, on-premises or at > 500m in free space for about $3 and with very low power-consumption in stand-by mode.

Nice, 100 people show interest in what was meant as a showcase project for the STM8 Value Line eForth project!

It's true, Forth differs a lot from procedural programing languages like Java, C++, C, Pascal, or Fortran. If you put the religious wars about programing languages aside, you'll see properties of scripting (Bash, BASIC, Perl, Python), REPL (LISP, Clojure), and ... assembly. It's not a panacea, but for some things it's very good.

I'd like to encourage you to get one or two of the green DCDC boards, an ST-LINK V2 adapter, and a serial interface adapter. With budget delivery, this will cost you about $4. It would be really nice to some companions on this journey, and to get some feedback about which features are needed most, or which points need better docs :-)

EDIT: 102 people now. Thanks guys! I forgot to mention the two capacitors and the two resistors. If you don't have an assortment in your lab anyway, here and here are examples for what you'd need for this, and for other projects (you may also ask a friend for some of these half-a-penny items).

Does someone know of a Hackaday page with recommendations for an "electronics starter kit"?